The Kremlin is confident that mass protests in Iran have peaked, and Tehran’s leadership has managed to squash domestic resistance to its rule, according to one of Russia’s pre-eminent experts on Iran.Russia’s embassy in Tehran apparently informed Moscow that the protests have died down and that the Kremlin “can breathe a sigh of relief”, Nikita Smagin told Al Jazeera.The protests over economic hardships erupted on December 28, spreading to hundreds of cities and towns throughout the sanctions-hit nation of more than 90 million.Iranian law enforcement squashed them, possibly violently, and Moscow “thinks that nothing threatens Iran from within”, said Smagin, who fled Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned “the illegal Western pressure” and lambasted the unnamed “external forces” that strive to “destabilise and destroy” the Islamic Republic.“The notorious methods of ‘colour revolutions’ are being used, when specifically trained and armed provocateurs turn peaceful protests into cruel and senseless lawlessness, pogroms, the killing of law enforcement officers and average citizens, including children,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariya Zakharova claimed.She used a decades-old Kremlin mantra about “colour revolutions” allegedly organised and paid for by the West in former Soviet nations of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s to topple Moscow- …
